The purpose of this blog entry is to preview that both IBM and HP will be coming out with formal statements stating IBM and more specifically Informix support for Itanium on HP-UX. Current Informix customers running on HP-UX Itanium should not have any doubts about continuing on this platform. HP has declared its HP-UX PA-RISC support will end in 2013 and is actively motivating its customer base on PA-RISC to migrate to HP Itanium. Informix has supported this migration. Besides the fact that Informix has had a long history of supporting the HP-UX operating system, there are specific features that will make this migration easier.

An Informix customer currently running on HP PA-RISC does not have to unload and reload the data when moving to HP-UX Itanium. It is simply a direct upgrade of the hardware. This will save you a tremendous amount of time/resource for migration.

If an Informix customer uses High Availability Data Replication (HDR), it can choose to have the primary on HP-UX PA-RISC and the secondary running on HP-UX Itanium. The reverse is also true. This provides the customer more options as it transitions to HP-UX Itanium while maintaining the ability for High Availability.

If you are an Oracle customer running on HP-UX Itanium today and wondering what you should do, there is a very simple choice. It will be more cost effective to switch data base than to switch hardware. You can switch to an Informix data base providing Enterprise class OLTP and Data Warehousing capabilities with a fraction of the data base administration needed, and at a much lower total cost. Best of all, you do not have to worry about the outcome the lawsuits between the two companies to decide what to do with your system.